Regulation of Lawyers
Stephen Gillers,You don’t want to embarrass yourself or, worse, get kicked off the island. You buy a guidebook to tell you how to act in different business and social situations. What should you expect?
This book is a guidebook of sorts. Its silent subtitle could be How to Perform in the Law. It tells you how to act in a new place—Lawyerland—a place where most readers of this book will spend decades of their working life. You need to know the customs or, more accurately, the rules in order to thrive.
How to act. In The Performance of Self in Everyday Life, the sociologist Erving Goffman compared everyday face-to-face encounters to acting, to a series of performances. In chapter 7A,Robert Post draws on Goffman’s study of performance and acting to help understand the popular perception of American lawyers. “All the world’s a stage,” Jacques declared in As You Like It, anticipating Goffman by centuries. Law practice is also a stage, on which,updating Jacques, a lawyer in her lifetime will play many parts.